Meet Shreyan Dey

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Shreyan Dey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Shreyan, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?

I keep my creativity alive by finding small ways to combine my personal passions while making an impact on those in my community who lack basic necessities.

Beginning with last year, I found the activity of hosting charity sports tournaments as an extremely meaningful way to combine my passion for sports, community engagement, and competition. The drive to make each tournament more impactful pushes me to continue combining different ideas and passions that not only resonate with me, but also resonate with participants and hopefully, the community.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

Finding a passion for playing sports at an early age, I always viewed the activity as a way to not only indulge in something exciting, but to also bring people together. Whether it was on the tennis court or the soccer field, I experienced firsthand how competition didn’t just provide an intense experience for athletes to improve themselves, but it united athletes from different regions and backgrounds.

Last year, I read online in an article that 1 in 8 people within North Texas face hunger. Reading about the severity of this issue, I looked to find a way to combine my personal passion, sports, with an effort to help alleviate the growing issue of food insecurity within my community. Hosting charity sports tournaments came to mind as an idea.

That idea led to the creation of Play4Plates, a charity sports organization focused on hosting prize money sports tournaments in the North Texas area and using the proceeds from each tournament to fund meals for families in need.

Athletes in the local community come together to essentially play for a bigger cause. The prize money awards within our tournaments do make the games a bit more competitive, but we’ve seen firsthand how something just as simple as a basketball game can be a catalyst for greater change within the community.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three qualities that have proved crucial are adaptability, empathy, and a willingness to fail.

Adaptability means to be open to adjusting and exploring new avenues to reach the same goal. The process of hosting tournaments hasn’t always gone to plan. Sometimes the courts we plan on using are occupied. Other times, we receive too many player withdrawals right before our scheduled matches. Embracing other approaches such as rescheduling our events instead of canceling them and letting a few hindrances ruin our plans has been very important.

Having a willingness to fail has also been crucial. Starting out, we weren’t able to get many players to sign up for our tournaments due to a lack of engagement and interest. Our very first tournament did not raise a lot of money. Embracing failure in a positive light and continuing to adjust our advertising strategies has been very beneficial in our process of expanding our tournaments.

Lastly, empathy has also been very important. The core mission of ours is to address food insecurity within the community, and understanding of the struggles of others and empathizing with them fuels our passion and reminds us that sports really can make a difference.

A piece of advice I have for others is to listen to your passions. My passion is sports, and I’ve found a fun way to incorporate sports to try and achieve something bigger. For me, hosting charity sports tournaments has been a very exiting activity. You simply never know where your passions can take you.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

We’re always looking for other nonprofit organizations and food charities out there to collaborate with. If you’re a charity sports organization, we’d love to connect through Instagram and potentially host a collaborative charity sports tournament. We’re always looking to expand our tournaments and collaborations would certainly be the next step to achieve our bigger goal in terms of reach and impact.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @p4pcharity